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Frederick J. Stroheim
In 1945, while Stalin’s barbarians looted the banks and museums of Berlin, the Americans quietly sifted the ashes of the Third Reich for more valuable spoils of victory. Through Reinhard Gehlen, once Hitler’s master spy, America gained the services of Germany’s European Intelligence network, and, soon, countless Nazi War Criminals became employees of the nascent CIA. Operation Paperclip, which covertly transported thousands of Nazi scientists to the USA to continue their work for the Pentagon, stockpiled another kind of intelligence. Among them was Klaus Stroheim, who accomplished remarkable things at Dachau and whose work was bolder and more successful than Mengele’s, albeit with a higher mortality rate. As Nuremberg lumbered along and wrote history, the CIA busily rewrote it to suit expediency. Like Von Braun and Rubolph, Klaus Stroheim achieved the status of elder statesman of science. When Senator Joseph McCarthy sought his council, Klaus delivered a list of twenty–four known Communist sympathizers within the scientific community, including Doctor Tomorrow, and when President Truman anxiously took a photograph with him, he congratulated him on the remarkable work that he was doing for them. At home, Klaus instructed his son, Frederick, on the achievements of Lysenko, whom he claimed had not have been a fool in his interpretation of the genetics of the past, but a visionary of new genetics of the future. But just like Klaus’ lessons were not easily forgotten, neither were the deeds of his youth. In the midst of the chaos of 1972, an elderly Jew whose terminal malignancy Klaus cured using a serum made from the spinal fluid of his mother and his children recognized him on the street and shot him. As Klaus lay on his death bed, he told his son that the mistakes, they were consigned to the mass grave of failure, the impotent, and forgotten, and warned him to beware of his success. Frederick J. Stroheim is the scientist in charge of Project Lazarus. =The Angel of Death= He strikes like a bolt of lightning. Bones and sinew are ground into powder in his hands. Microscopic machines whisper into his brain and haunt him with memories of an erased past. Once he was Raymond Garrison. Now he is Bloodshot… and he is the walking dead! Trapped in a labyrinth of conspiracy, Raymond will not skulk in the shadows fingering his way through filling cabinets! He has big guns, searing reflexes, and the indomitable will to learn why the mob has taken his life – and the United States government has stolen his soul. What he will discover is something so terrible that it will affect every man, woman, and child on Earth. The Walking Dead After DOA Director Simon Oreck told him that the situation was unacceptable, Stroheim suggested that the process they employed to retrieve and alter Raymond’s memories guaranteed that he was hopefully insane. When Director Oreck proposed that the cause of Raymond’s behavior was because they revived Angelo Mortalli and not Raymond Garrison, Stroheim asked for God to forgive him. The Disassembled Man While Cameron Sinclair, a DOA agent and friend of Raymond Garrison, reported the events of the battle between the Chainsaw, the team of highly–tech mercenaries, and Raymond, Stroheim accused the director of risking the destruction of the prime assembler that Raymond carried in his blood. Enraged, Director Oreck warned Stroheim that he was more qualified to asses the situation than him, then, when he realized that Raymond had survived the first volley, he asked Stroheim how long he could continue to function and the doctor confessed that he did not know how he could still be alive at all. Prometheus Unbound When Raymond Garrison returned to Project Lazarus and demanded that Stroheim tell him the truth of what happened to him, Stroheim told him that truth was an existential construct with no reliable means of objective analysis, and that he preferred to concern himself with facts. Offended by Raymond’s entrance and demands, Stroheim told that they were an extremely ill-mannered way to address the man who gave him life, to which Raymond retorted that he was only his creator on the outside. When Stroheim refused to explain himself to Raymond, he rhetorically asked him what possible answers could the creation rightfully demand from the creator. Desperate for an answer, Raymond asked Stroheim what he was and why he created him. After he looked upon the thing that he had created and wondered how to make him understand the banality of his request, Stroheim forced Raymond to behold all creation inside a tank of water. As Stroheim told Raymond that from the first primitive replicators swam in tidal pools of preblotic fluid and built to the critical mass of the Cambrian explosion through repeated mass extinctions, he said that the purpose of life was to live, and that it existed because it could just as he made him because he could. While Stroheim showed Raymond the regeneration tank, he told him that the emergent possibilities of technological confluence had made him inevitable, and explained how, once the conditions of survival had been carefully supervised and manipulated, he achieved direct evolution of a vastly accelerated schedule by compressing billions of years of natural selection into less than a decade. Stroheim told Raymond how from molecular engineering he took the means to shape crude mechanisms built from handfuls of atoms, how genetic algorithms from simulated cellular automata of artificial life provided the kernels on which to base their operating systems, and how biology established the instructions necessary to imperfectly replicate life to allow for the rare error that conferred advantage. After Stroheim said that he created neo-biological organisms that served his whims, even revive the dead, Raymond told him that tiny robots were just robots and not being dead was not the same as being alive. When Stroheim retorted that any sufficiently advanced nanotechnology was indistinguishable from life, Raymond accused him of thinking that he was indistinguishable from God. As Raymond cast his cold eye upon him, Stroheim mused that it had been his intention for him to be perfect in every way, but as his extraordinary ugliness overwhelmed him, he wondered what had gone wrong. Enraged, Raymond grabbed Stroheim by the collar and told him to look down at his work and tell him if he found it was good, then he tossed him against a vat of fluid and said that if he was God then he was an atheist. As a nanological solution filled the laboratory, the contamination hazard protocols sealed the affected area and activated a thermal sterilization that would incinerate the room. When Stroheim tried to reach the keypad and enter the countermand code before they died, Raymond held him back and told him that he still owed him. When Stroheim told Raymond that he made him what he was and gave him life, Raymond retorted that he did not ask for it and told him that if he wanted to live he had to give him a reason. While Raymond held him by the collar, Stroheim told him that he was responsible for developing the process that brought him to life, but that he did not know what they were going to use him for because they did not brief on matters of strategic deployment since he did not need to know. Angered with the realization that he was nothing more than a weapon made of meat, Raymond tossed Stroheim aside, and, while he destroyed the laboratory, he demanded that Stroheim tell him how many others there were in his inventory of living dead. As Stroheim told him that he needed the prime assembler he hosted to create others like him, Raymond shattered his hand and stopped him from reaching the keypad and annulling the thermal sterilization. While Raymond welcomed the end, Simon Oreck halted the process offered to provide him with what he sought if he dared risk finding it. When Raymond asked him who he was, Oreck told him that a mutual friend of their, Michael Pileggi, would call him the brains of the operation. Since he was finished with Stroheim, Raymond left him in the rubble of his laboratory and followed an illuminated path to where Oreck promised he would find the poison pill of truth on a silver plate. Category: Bloodshot Category: Characters